The Aliens (Third Rail Repertory)

They’re only human.

Since her first play stunned New York audiences four years
ago, Annie Baker, 31, has gone from obscurity to acclaim. In that time,
critics have scraped away at her plays, trying to unearth what makes
them so rich, so unsettling and, most of all, so real. Never mind that
Baker herself rejects such labels as realism and naturalism, and that
there’s much in her plays that’s more surrealistic than anything else.
Take, for example, a moment in Third Rail’s deeply humane and quietly
unnerving production of The Aliens. KJ (Isaac Lamb), a bearlike
30-year-old who lives at home and drinks shroom tea, tells a story. At
age 5, he was obsessed with the word “ladder” and repeated it
incessantly, until his mother let him shout the word as often and as
deafeningly as he needed. Lamb delivers a monologue—if it can be called
that—composed of that single word. I began counting the number of
repetitions and then lost track, finding myself hypnotized and horrified
and heartbroken. It’s sublime and sorrowful, wonderful and terrible.

The Aliens, as
with much of Baker’s work, is constrained but not contrived. It’s set
in the scruffy backyard of a cafe, where KJ and Jasper (Chris Murray)
gather amid the trash cans and busted bicycles. After Jasper, a
Bukowski-reading chain-smoker who’s writing a novel, kicks over a chair,
teenage employee Evan (Bryce Earhart) tries to shoo them away. But KJ
and Jasper can sense how Evan yearns to belong—they’re loners
themselves, after all—and they welcome him. It would be easy to say this
irreverent yet warm duo teaches Evan about life and identity, but what
unfurls is far more intricate, and far more tragic, than that.

Under Tim True’s confident direction, the actors create intensely empathetic characters. Lamb, in a wig right out of Wayne’s World,
nails the gentle comedy as well as his character’s twitchy discomfort.
The tightly wound Murray will twist your insides into knots, and his
impassioned reading of his manuscript is so musical it borders on slam
poetry. The 16-year-old Earhart more than holds his own, his character
carefully testing his words to best impress his older friends (watch how
he waffles when they ask if he writes poetry).

And all this in a
play stacked with silences, pauses and half starts. Aside from
occasional surges of language (“that was like a crazy head
rush-slash-heart attack,” Jasper gushes), the dialogue is elliptical and
sparse. While some playwrights force characters to plow ahead with
dialogue, Baker makes her characters wait. These empty spaces are
remarkable—and also uncomfortable or tense or weird. Are they real? By
play’s end, that question no longer matters.